Painter & poet
by AzaleaRill
Summary: Joseph Severn witnesses the death of John Keats.


**Please note that this is pure fiction. Parts of it are taken from the biography "Keats" by Andrew Motion but it is mostly a work of imagination. The "Body Guard" is completely made up and has no basis in reality. Also please note that the lines of poetry in the beginning of this story are from Robert Browings "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came".**

* * *

Joseph Severn was dreaming.

He was sitting in Brown's front room at Wentworth Place holding a cup of tea just given him by Miss Fanny Brawn. Across the room, John Keats was sitting in the sun, staring at him. "...a sick man very near to death seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end," Keats said, as if they had only just been conversing about a bit of verse.

But something was terribly wrong. "That's not yours," said Severn, the teacup rattling against the plate as his hand suddenly tremored.

Keats turned his dark eyes away from Severn and spoke again. "I guessed who would break, who would write my epitaph for pastime if I at his council turned down that track."

"No, not my council alone, Keats...," the teacup suddenly crashed to the floor. Severn looked up and and found himself in a hazy vision of that now-hated room in Rome. Keats lay supine in bed, his hair snarled with fever sweat, face pale as the blood flecked pillow case. "The laudanum, Severn."

Severn made no reply but scratched on at one of his never-ending letters. Keats weakly raised an arm, hooked his fingers behind a cup of coffee on the bedside table and sent it smashing to the floor.

"The laudanum."

He'd had to to tell Keats he'd handed the drug over to Dr. Clark.

That pronouncement seemed to change Keats from a sick man in control of his own fate to one who only knew a "posthumous existence" and waited darkly for it to end.

Severn was just as suddenly back in Brown's parlour, Keats now standing, his short stature seeming to grow with his accusatory anger. "What else should he be set for? What save to waylay, with his lies ensnare..."

Hope. Stupid, prayerful hope. That's what Severn had been posted for, because no one else had any. And he'd kept it too, that hope, kept it through the stop-and-go voyage and the hellacious quarantine in dock. In Rome, Keats had gotten no worse, but he'd gotten no better either and the entire expedition seemed an unproductive retreat from which they would both return unchanged,

That was until the hemorrhaging, until the loss of appetite, until Keats had become bedridden.

Between each fall, Severn always had a surge of hope that "this was the worst of it" and his friend could only get better. He clutched at hope like a drug, getting it where and when he could and finding only dark misery if none were to be had.

As dreams do, the scene shifted ambiguously and Severn was standing in the garden at Hampstead looking toward the open lane.

"Go, draw breath freelier outside, ('since all is o'er,' he saith, 'And the blow fallen no grieving can amend')." Keats voice was a whisper behind him, the strange lines like an echo in the wrong direction. Severn turned to see the young poet standing just inside a dark portal. "I shall not shame such tender love and stay."

Severn raised a hand, but whether to reach out to Keats or bid him adieu, he couldn't say, for at that moment, the hazy world broke up as he was shaken back into the grim reality of their dingy lodgings in Rome.

* * *

"He's yours now, painter. Him and the reaper standin' in the corner."

The old women who had professed to have been "once a nurse in London town" hardly waited for Severn to blink the debilitating sleep from his eyes before she was gone.

He shuffled into the sickroom and dropped into the chair by the bed where Keats lay gasping faintly against the pillows. Whether he was conscious or not, Severn could hardly tell anymore. Keats' eyes were perpetually half-lidded and fixed in his gaunt, death pale face framed by the dark, lank hair that he used to constantly brush from his eyes as he sat writing. The animated poet was gone, replaced by this horrid spectacle of suffering. There were no pretty lines of poesy that could transform this into a sweet death.

"Severn."

The young painter jerked his head up at the thready sound of his name and wondered if he had fallen into sleepy reverie as Keats countenance had not changed. But the thin lips fluttered and he heard: "Lift me up, Severn, for I am dying." Keats fully closed his eyes now. "Thank God that it has finally come."

Unable to do aught else, Severn slid his arm beneath Keats' shoulders and, kneeling on the bed, pulled his friend up high against the pillows. So tired was Severn that he did not move back to his chair but leaned back with Keats, his arm still around his friend. He pressed his face against the top of Keats head, unmindful of the damp locks, and murmured "I'm so sorry, John."

"Don't breath on me," gasped Keats in delirium, "it comes upon me like ice."

Severn lay his head back away from Keats against the bed frame and, unable to resist his exhaustion, closed his eyes. The last he remembered was the sound of John's labored breathing as phlegm "boiled up" in his throat.

* * *

Severn blinked out of half-doze a short time later. The sun, which had been slanting through the window when he came in, was now just disappearing beneath the horizon. He moved cautiously, Keats withered form still cradled by his side.

"He sleeps," Severn thought instinctively as he moved his arm from round his friend.

Then, he realized how very quiet everything was. A sudden strange stir caught in his breast. He looked at Keats laying against the pillows, eyes closed, his expression easy and free of any care. No breath struggled past the slightly parted lips, no agony animated the still limbs.

John Keats was dead.

Severn slumped heavily into the bedside chair, staring and staring. He felt heavy, then light; cold, then suddenly hot at the same time. His mind was numb, so much so that he did not hear the knock at the door, the steady tread upon the stair as Dr. Clark came for his nightly, ineffectual check-in.

Severn did not remember what the doctor said nor how the man shook him a bit, forcing a small glass into his hand. Only later would he recall the burn of brandy on his tongue and the doctor's sudden, hurried departure.

Then he was alone again with ... not Keats...no, this was not him anymore. This was just a cast of the young poet. His hands were merely plaster against the bedspread, his face but a death mask that preserves a likeness for friends and family to look upon in their time of grief. This idea would have shored him up until the doctor's return, but the cruel world was not done with Joseph Severn.

Alerted by the doctor's sudden departure and informed by the fact that he hired a cab headed to the city center, the much maligned landlady called a nearby constable to her parlour. She complained of a "suspicious death" that could cause contagion if the body were not dealt with at once. Fear of the spread of disease in his ward spurred the man to contact the "Body Guard" to take action at once.

Severn was jerked out of his stupor by the sound of many boots upon the stair. Before he could gather his wits, the Body Guard had descended upon the room. He was consigned to a corner by strange men in white gloves and tall hats. Despite his feeble protestations, they lifted the body from the bed and stripped it of garments. Then, to Severn's everlasting horror, one pair of white gloved hands wielded a scalpel and split the chest open from the base of the throat to the bottom of the sternum.

There was a gruesome cracking sound as the chest cavity was opened and Severn may well have swooned had further monstrous action been taken, but the speedy return of a protesting Dr. Clark halted the procedure. He displayed an official certificate that pronounced "consumption" as the cause of death, eliminating the need for the hasty autopsy. Though moved by Severn's terrible distress, the doctor could not help wanting a look at the terrible state of the lungs before a pair of white gloves with a vicious looking needle and thick black thread closed the indecently gaping wound with quick, sure movements.

The Body Guard made short work of shrouding the body and moving it to the confines of a coffin that Dr. Clark paid ready money to provide. Severn was just able to tuck a thick sheaf of letters and scribbled poetry beside the body before the lid was efficiently nailed down. He thought that once the coffin was removed from the lodgings, there would be time to gather his wits.

Not so!

Dr. Clark informed him that the only opportunity for a decent burial was one that had to take place immediately, before dawn in the Protestant cemetery. Keats had neither been a Catholic nor a citizen of Rome and it was pure courtesy that allowed the burial to take place during the dark night, let alone at all. It was that or an unmarked pauper's grave on the outskirts of the city.

By the time dawn touched the immortal city, the deed was done. A couple of half-drunk grave diggers, Dr. Clark and Severn were the only witnesses and the latter was so numb with shock that the proceeding barely registered. It was not until they came back to the lodgings Keats and Severn had occupied for so long that there was a breaking point for the young artist.

They had just gained the great wide stairs below the windows of said rooms when Severn recognized items in a pile collected in the lodging-house doorway. He looked up at the sound of a commotion and saw a mattress make its way out a familiar portal. Once it reached the ground, this was summarily set on fire by a man administering as such to several pieces of furniture. Severn picked up Keats' great coat out of the dust where it had been thrown with other articles of clothing and grimly climbed the narrow stairs. He found the landlady watching resolutely as wallpaper was stripped and chairs broken into kindling.

Offering neither condolences or sympathy, she presented him with a bill for the "cleaning" that the rooms were undergoing. Included in the charges were a number of pieces of crockery which had been broken or damaged. She displayed these items on a nearby table as evidence.

Severn looked from the bill to the dishes and around the rooms that had been his confinement these last terrible weeks. Irritated by his dumb reaction, the landlady pointed out the remains of a certain coffee set that she insisted would have to be entirely replaced as there were too many damaged pieces.

Something broke in Severn at the mention of broken coffee cups and horrible grief suddenly animated his face. Uttering a groaning curse, he began to wield his cane against what remained of the crockery on the table, smashing it and the rickety piece of furniture to bits. He might have turned upon the landlady herself had not Dr. Clark been there to pull him away and back down the stairs.

The trembling young man choked inarticulate utterances in their wake across the wide steps that separated the lodging houses from private residences. The doctor was able to steer him into the foyer of his own house before Severn completely broke down. He fell to his knees clutching Keats' great coat to him. All the scenes of his friends' great suffering washed over him at once, coupled with the few memories of good days in the beginning, when they walked Rome slowly together, Keats soft, occasional smile never really reaching the poets' eyes.

"John!" he sobbed suddenly, forcefully. "John!"

Then Mrs. Clark was there, holding him like a child to her bosom as a great, wretched grief took hold of him. Severn cried as he never had before in his life, great aching sobs pulled from the depths of his being. He was awash in a terrible sadness that reserves its sharpest claws for those who have infinite hope. All the goodness and justice he believed of in God ripped to shreds, leaving him bleeding raw emotion that could not be staunched. For a moment, Severn thought he himself would perish of this great wound that was so agonizing he could not breath.

Then a cool glass was pressed against his lips and he was just conscious of the bitter taste of the hated, longed for laudanum.

Joseph Severn slept for 36 hours straight. He did not dream.

* * *

The end.


End file.
